dmunger | September 21, 2007I play a pick-up game of soccer for two hours once a week. This game is notorious for causing injuries: one time I twisted my foot and was out of commission for a year. The game has resulted in multiple surgeries for some of the players involved. So why do we play? Mostly because it's a lot of fun.
Now a new study led by Peter Klustrup offers us a new reason to play: Apparently if we don't kill ourselves during the game, we actually get more exercise than spending an equivalent amount of time jogging:
Each period of exercise lasted about one hour and took place three times a week. After 12…
dmunger | September 20, 2007
Here's a task that four-year-olds can do but three-year-olds have some trouble with. Imagine Sally in the picture below is playing with a ball. She puts the ball in the box and goes to the kitchen to get a drink. While she's gone, Bill takes the ball out of the box and puts it in the bucket. When Sally returns, where does she look for the ball?
Most three-year-olds will say Sally would look in the bucket, apparently failing to realize that Sally doesn't know anything about what Bill did while she was gone. Some researchers have explained this phenomenon by speculating that young children…
dmunger | September 20, 2007Synesthesia is a fascinating phenomenon: It almost seems impossible that some people can see colors associated with sounds, emotions, or letters and numbers. Yet many do -- as many as one percent of people experience some synesthesia.
V.S. Ramachandran and others have suggested that synesthesia is less of a disorder than an exaggeration of some aspects of the perceptual system. At CogDaily, we've even informally found that some colors are more frequently associated with particular emotions among our readers.
Now a new study has found some patterns in the perceptions of synesthetes:…
dmunger | September 19, 2007The headline on Science Daily reads "One-third Of Spam Is 'Health'-related," but the real news comes from the highly readable PLoS Medicine source article, "Will Spam Overwhelm Our Defenses? Evaluating Offerings for Drugs and Natural Health Products."
Peter Gernburd and Alejandro R. Jadad analyzed the spam in three different email accounts last November and came up with some startling results. Of the over 4,100 spam messages received, over 1,300 were "health"-related. Most of us, I assume, simply move these messages to our spam folders, and most of it goes there automatically. But Gernburd…
dmunger | September 18, 2007We have one of these little dragons in our living room.
Here's the page with instructions on how to make your own. Hint: Use stiff paper!
dmunger | September 18, 2007Take a look at this video (QuickTime required). The screen will turn white for 1/2 second. Then a word will appear for about 1.5 seconds. Pay attention to the particular shade of gray the word is printed in. Next, a strip of five different grey squares will appear. Which square matches the color of the word?
It's a difficult task, but not impossible (we'll collect answers in a poll at the end of the post). A team led by Brian P. Meier had college student volunteers complete a similar task, and they were able to achieve 30 percent accuracy -- somewhat better than the 20 percent you would…
dmunger | September 18, 2007When we were in Vienna this past summer, we were surprised to learn that in Mozart's time, symphonic concerts were often mish-mashes: single movements and "greatest hits" arias instead of complete works. Audiences applauded after each movement. We saw a reenactment of such a concert, in 18th-century costumes:
If only we had been studying for the LSAT, we might not have had to read the program notes. Apparently the reading comprehension items in a recent study guide focused on how music was performed at the turn of the 19th century:
A. The final movements of symphonies by Mozart and…
dmunger | September 17, 2007David Amodio and his colleagues have taken a lot of heat across the internet for their recent brief report on brain and behavior correlation with political views (see here for one of the more strident pundit reactions). The Neurocritic was able to track down Amodio himself and get his responses to some more serious criticism:
People have complained that there were more liberals the conservatives in the sample. True, in an absolute sense. But this is typical in political psychology: Americans are more conservative on average, and so more extreme conservatives usually rate themselves as…
dmunger | September 17, 2007Over at BPR3, we've picked the top three icons from the BPR3 icon contest. Here are the top three entries in the contest to design a universal icon that everyone can use on their blog posts whenever the post is a serious commentary about a paper published in a peer-reviewed journal:
Kevin Z:
Uriel Klieger:
Jeff Hunt:
Vote for your favorite, but also please make suggestions for improvements in the comments section -- the winning entry will have the opportunity to be revised before we declare it "final." Feel free to copy this poll and put it on your own blog so we can get the largest…
dmunger | September 14, 2007Last week's Casual Friday study had a secret: We weren't just interested in whether you like light desserts; we also wanted to know if the weight and/or gender of the dessert chef influenced your opinion of a dessert.
Each survey participant saw two different versions of a dessert recipe:
Each recipe was randomly credited to one of four chefs:
Then readers rated the recipes for taste, creativity, and healthiness. We wanted to know the dessert chef would influence the ratings. Maybe the heavier chefs would be seen as less credible in presenting the "light" recipes. Maybe heavier chefs…
dmunger | September 14, 2007Do you ever watch the TV show Survivorman? The show's host, Les Stroud, is voluntarily "stranded" in a wide array of dangerous situations in the wild, without even a film crew, and videotapes himself figuring out how to build a shelter, find food, and get out alive.
One thing I find particularly interesting about the show is that Stroud generally doesn't seek food first -- he builds a shelter. Frequently he doesn't eat at all for the first few days. Then, when he finally manages to find something to eat, it's something most westerners would consider repulsive: ants, scorpions, rodents, even…
dmunger | September 13, 2007In 1999, Melissa Kamins and Carol Dweck made a striking discovery about the best way to praise children. When you are helping a child learn to read, saying "you are a smart girl" as opposed to "you did a good job reading" results in very different behavior when she has trouble reading in the future. Children who have received praise about their abilities ("you're smart") rather than specific praise about a task ("you did a good job ___") are more likely to exhibit "helpless" behavior when they encounter problems. Even though they were praised in both cases, telling kids they are "smart" just…
dmunger | September 13, 2007When people are in car crashes and other fearful situations, they tend to report that time "slows down," or that things "move in slow-motion." I remember a similar experience when I got hit by a car as a child. But can this phenomenon be measured? Here's a video of an experiment that purports to do that:
What do you think?
dmunger | September 13, 2007We got a great response to last week's Casual Friday study on dessert preferences. However, I've realized that there's one more bit of information I need. Ideally I should have put this question in the survey itself, but it's too late for that, so this follow-up will have to do. I need to know what CogDaily readers think of the celebrity chefs we featured -- so I'd appreciate it if you responded to this poll (whether or not you took the survey). Here are the chefs that were featured in the survey:
Now for the secret about the study. While we were interested in the question of whether…
dmunger | September 12, 2007Clive Thompson's latest column in Wired has an interesting thesis: Only geeks are smart enough to give away their money in ways that will truly help others. He points to the research of psychologist Paul Slovic to make his case:
We'll usually race to help a single stranger in dire straits, while ignoring huge numbers of people in precisely the same plight. We'll donate thousands of dollars to bring a single African war orphan to the US for lifesaving surgery, but we don't offer much money or political pressure to stop widespread genocides in Rwanda or Darfur.
You could argue that we're simply…
dmunger | September 11, 2007This is a fun little study. The instructions are embedded in the video.
Did you get it right? Have you seen this study before?
It's based on an experiment by Daniel Simons. You can find another demonstration here.
dmunger | September 11, 2007
A recent report in Nature Neuroscience has gotten a lot of press. The headlines proclaim that "left-wing" brains are different from "right wing" brains. Are our brains literally hard-wired to be conservative or liberal? The article in the L.A. Times sure seems to suggest it:
Sulloway said the results could explain why President Bush demonstrated a single-minded commitment to the Iraq war and why some people perceived Sen. John F. Kerry, the liberal Massachusetts Democrat who opposed Bush in the 2004 presidential race, as a "flip-flopper" for changing his mind about the conflict.
Really?…
dmunger | September 11, 2007The BPR3 icon contest is now complete -- here are the entries:
One of these icons will be chosen for any blogger to use to show when a post is a serious commentary about a paper published in a peer-reviewed journal, and not just a link to a press release or media commentary. We'll be using it on all our research posts once the icon is finalized.
All the blog posts using the icon from across the blogosphere will be collected at BPR3.org, so readers will have one place to go to find the most serious, informed blogging on the net. Soon you'll be able to vote for your favorite icon. We'll let…
dmunger | September 10, 2007There were so many fascinating news stories from around the web this weekend that I couldn't pick just one to tell you about this morning. Here's a sampler:
Study finds humans better at social skills than apes. Why is this news? Because the humans in question were just two and a half years old. The toddlers were picked because they were at about the same cognitive level as the apes they were being compared with. Yet the humans did better at social tasks such as learning by imitation. The researchers argue this pokes a hole in the idea that there's such a thing as "general intelligence."…